Granddaddy’s Goats

by Mrs. G.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, can tell a story like my Granddaddy. He was raised in the South during the Depression, and he had an uncanny knack for discovering life-threatening situations when he visited his grandparents in a Tennessee valley called “the holler.” Consequently, Granddaddy has a lot of stories to tell, and he tells them all so well with his rich Southern drawl. There’s the time he caught the turkey buzzard in the car and the time he nearly broke his neck riding a tire down steep hills and there’s the minnow swallowing contest and when they almost burnt down a barn and when he went to Europe in World War II and nearly got killed trying to ski and the list goes on and on. But one of the all-time best stories, one that has built my family’s faith, is the time Granddaddy prayed for a pony. He told it like this:

When I was a boy, there wasn’t anything in this world that I wanted more than a pony. Every night I prayed as hard as I could that God would give me a pony. We didn’t have enough money to feed us, much less a pony; but even so, I prayed for that pony.

I was up in Tennessee staying with Ma and Pa [his grandparents; they lived in a log cabin] shortly thereafter, and one morning when I got up and walked outside the cabin, I found a nanny goat staying out there in the yard. I gave her a piece of biscuit that was left over from breakfast, and she thought that was pretty good. We spent the rest of the day trying to find out who she belonged to, but we couldn’t find anybody for several miles around who owned any goats.

The goat must have decided that we looked (or smelled) like her kind of folks because she just stayed with us. The very next day she gave birth to twins. Then after her kids got big enough, she . . . had twins again. In fact, every time she gave birth, she had twins. So it wasn’t long before we had goats all over the place. We had goats to pet, goats to ride, goats to pull our little wagon, and, of course, plenty of goats to eat. From then on, we ate better than most of our neighbors. Those things were having kids so fast that they were reproducing faster than we could eat them. We didn’t have to worry about feeding them because all they ate was leaves and grass, and there was plenty of that.
There was a cave next to the barn that had a spring flowing out of it. Pa built a concrete cistern to catch the spring water. That cave was where the goats stayed. They seemed to like it since it was cool in the summer and warm in the winter…

[One night] we were just about ready to go to bed when all of a sudden, two of the billy goats got to fighting underneath the cabin. They made the awfullest racket you ever heard in all your life. But the goat fight stopped almost as quick as it started because of the goats got his horn stuck up through one of the cracks in the floor and couldn’t get it out. Pa had to roll over in bed and drive the ol’ goat’s horn back down through the cracks with the heel of his shoe.

Granddaddy told us that when times improved for the family and they could afford to feed themselves, the goats left just as suddenly as they had come. Granddaddy told his son–and now his grandchildren–this story to remind us how faithful God is. He answers prayers–sometimes better than we could imagine. Thank God He sometimes gives us “goats” when we ask for “ponies!”

Mrs. G. is the blessed and happy woman who married the only man with a YLCF e-mail address: Gretchen’s brother William. She loves Jesus, William, her family, dear friends, good cooking, pets, good stories, training dogs, a good read, hiking, fussing with house plants, fuzzy socks, tea, and trampolines.